Food Co-ops have a history of supporting product boycotts as a way to encourage social justice in the food system. But as they grow, co-ops can become more hesitant to endanger relationships with major suppliers and remove popular products. PCC Natural Markets, the largest natural food cooperative in the US, has been facing picketers for several months after refusing to honor the boycott of Driscoll’s berries...

Did you know that Minnesota is the #1 state for sheer number of cooperatives (at 1023)? Well, that number may increase as the city of Minneapolis (118 co-ops here!), following the lead of cities like New York and Madison, has decided to invest in further cooperative development.

Three Twin Cities food co-ops are considering merging into one, evoking memories of the last big proposed co-op consolidation in town. In 1993, five co-ops (The Wedge, Seward, Mississippi Market, Lakewinds, and River Market) considered a merger that would have created a single co-op with 4000 members (huge at the time)...

On Saturday, February 13, Roberta and Lynette Malles will be presenting “Co-op Warriors Honored: Revisiting the Co-op Wars of 1975-76,” a free workshop that seeks to better understand the Co-op Wars and to heal the wounds and broken relationships that persist from the conflict...

In her interview for Radical Roots, Mississippi Market General Manager Gail Graham told us that “from the beginning co-ops have been about social change.” When it comes to the natural food co-ops of the Twin Cities, she should know...

Organic farmer (and artist and musician and organizer) Audrey Arner used to be a vegetarian. Now days she and her husband Richard Handeen have around ninety head of cattle at Moonstone Farm in Western Minnesota.

In addition to interviewing Dean Zimmerman, co-op pioneer, one-time CO-member, and Freedom Summer activist, we also talked to his son, Klaus. At the time we interviewed him, the next-generation Zimmerman was farming with Stone’s Throw Urban Farm...

Making Radical Roots, we’ve focused on the vibrant youth culture that created the natural food co-ops in the 1970s, but also wanted to know how youth are involved in co-ops today. Luckily, we know Emily Lippold Cheney, who has dedicated herself to engaging young people in cooperatives from the very local level to the biggest international stages.

One name we kept hearing and reading while doing research for Radical Roots was Kris Olsen. Kris was a dedicated co-op activist who popped up all over our story: befriending Moe Burton while helping out the Bryant-Central Co-op, being physically thrown out of Seward Co-op by the CO (they needed a bunch of guys - Kris was very tall!)...

Recently, three co-op activists created Cooperative Principal as a new way for people to build the cooperative economy, grow their assets and have fun in the process. We interviewed Cooperative Principal partner Joe Riemann about it...

A couple of Washington, D.C., policy-writers developed new careers for themselves in the early 1990s when they published a book outlining a repeating cycle of American history and generational archetypes since 1584 (GENERATIONS: The History of America’s Future). William Strauss and Neil Howe argued that there are four generational archetypes that recur based on the cycle of history they are born into...

While the 1960s are generally thought of as the political awakening of the Baby Boomer generation, the 1970s weren’t exactly a historical snooze. Many of the people who started the Twin Cities food co-ops had been involved in 60s activism, and they continued this work, either within the co-ops or alongside them. But organic and local were not the powerhouse bywords then that they are today...

In this excerpt from our interview with Seward Co-op General Manager Sean Doyle for Radical Roots, Sean talks about his inspirational encounter with the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. Mondragon is a federation of hundreds of worker-owned cooperatives and is Spain’s 10th-largest business group

Part of the upsurge in grassroots organizing on Minneapolis’ West Bank in the 1970s was the West Bank Tenants Union. As a respected institution among you West Bankers, they were, at times, called on to mediate in the Co-op Wars...

In this interview for Radical Roots from 2013, ex-Cooperative Organization (CO) member Lynette Malles reflects on the divisions within the Twin Cities Occupy movement that resemble those in the early co-op movement, and how Occupy Homes flirted with the techniques that did so much damage when practiced by the CO...

In our interview of Riverside/New Riverside Cafe collective member Ken Logsdon for Radical Roots, he relates to us the great renovation of 1983. As he tells it, the process was fraught with misfortune and almost led to the Cafe closing.

In this video, former Riverside Cafe collective member Mary Alice Smalls reminisces about the evolution of the food served at the cafe. The cafe began with an emphasis on vegetarianism and affordability, and then changed with the community’s greater awareness of the value of local and organic food and the plight of farmworkers...

“These were awesome people… People with different ideas about life… people that just knew they would never fit in, but they wanted to have a place to gather and they wanted a community place.” - Eve MacLeish

Earlier today we posted an excerpt of our interview with Gary Cunningham that included his description of what it was like to be part of the Co-op Organization’s (CO) takeover of the Peoples’ Warehouse in May of 1975. Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Ken Logsdon about what it was like to be one of the people that the CO kicked out.

Yes, it’s true, and yes, it happened in 1976, when Gary Cunningham was still a teenager. The Marxist in question was a member of the Co-op Organization (C.O.) who had come to attack Gary’s uncle Moe Burton and to take control of the Bryant-Central Co-op, which Moe had founded.

“No one would ever mistake Moe for a hippie. But I think he liked that service part, and I think it was part of his whole life's arc. That he moved away from that serious revolutionary political stuff, more into a service role. Trying to be more effective. Trying to be more productive.”

"I think at its peak, like ‘79 or ‘80, there were like 300 or 350 sort of counterculture/alternative entities that contributed to this quality of life for this, you know, pretty large community of people who kind of wanted to take it off the grid politically and commercially.”

The “Co-op Wars” story which we are covering in Radical Roots had an interesting parallel in the 1920s among the first wave of food co-ops in Northern Minnesota, in which another Communist autocrat tried to take over the co-ops for his own purposes. Except this was no secret leader of a tiny sect, this was Joseph Stalin himself...

So right as this old wave is coming to a close, at least for the grocery co-ops, the folks in your documentary are first getting the idea that maybe we should just put some food out on a porch or we should find a way to do this at cost. It’s an interesting notion that as soon as the one wave recedes the other one starts to pick up the pace...

Interviewing many co-op founders, it has been striking that so many young radicals of the time were so inspired by Mao and the Chinese revolution. While the glum bureaucracy of the Soviet Union was hardly compelling, the apparent energy of the Chinese revolution, along with the Marxist revolutions throughout the Third World, seemed like a viable alternative to American capitalism and imperialism...